Book Club Kits: Love After the End

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Lambda Literary Award winner

A bold and breathtaking anthology of queer Indigenous speculative fiction, edited by the author of Jonny Appleseed.

This exciting and groundbreaking fiction collection showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer) Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism's histories.

Here, readers will discover bioengineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, mother ships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492.

Contributors include Nathan Adler, Darcie Little Badger, Gabriel Castilloux Calderon, Adam Garnet Jones, Mari Kurisato, Kai Minosh Pyle, David Alexander Robertson, jaye simpson, and Nazbah Tom.

Love After the End: Anthology Discussion Questions

1. Discuss which story was your favorite.
2. How did the Indigenous characters and authors experiences and beliefs align from story to story? How did they differ?
3. What were some of the themes of the collection as a whole?
4. What is the significance of each story’s title?
5. Is there any story you’d like to see as a full book?
6. What are your thoughts on short stories as a whole?
7. Why do you think the authors chose to do these stories as a short story collection instead of individual works?
8. What did you think of the worlds the authors created?
9. Were you satisfied with the outcome of the stories? Were there couples you rooted for or ones you didn’t?
10. What do you think truly makes a utopia versus a dystopia? What would make something a utopia for you? A dystopia?

Joshua Whitehead (he/him) is a Two-Spirit, Oji-nêhiyaw member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate, lecturer, and Killam scholar at the University of Calgary where he studies Indigenous literatures and cultures with a focus on gender and sexuality. His dissertation, tentatively titled "Feral Fatalisms," is a hybrid narrative of theory, essay, and non-fiction that interrogates the role of "ferality" inherent within Indigenous ways of being (with a strong focus on nêhiyawewin). He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer (Talonbooks 2017) which was shortlisted for the inaugural Indigenous Voices Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. He is also the author of Jonny Appleseed (Arsenal Pulp Press 2018) which was long listed for the Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Indigenous Voices Award, the Governor General's Literary Award, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award, and won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. Whitehead is currently working on a third manuscript titled, Making Love with the Land to be published with Knopf Canada, which explores the intersections of Indigeneity, queerness, and, most prominently, mental health through a nêhiyaw lens. Currently, he’s working as an editor for the forthcoming Love After the End: Two-Spirit Utopias and Dystopias to be released in 2019. You can find his work published widely in such venues as Prairie Fire, CV2, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Grain, CNQ, Write, and Red Rising Magazine.